Well - I feel I am between the devil and the deep blue sea here.
Gary Boye has transcribed all the music into staff notation and I looked through this. I also discussed it with him and he was surprised at the idea that the basses might be high. I didn't want to commit myself too much with Granata until I have had time to make my own transcriptions - which is very time consuming. I was more concerned to sort out Gallot first and I may make some revisions later. I do think that we need to be cautious about the way we interpret illustrations. They are not intended to show the instruments in accurate detail. The Rabel drawings in particular don't seem to me to be very reliable. Monica ----- Original Message ----- From: [1]Martyn Hodgson To: [2]Vihuelalist ; [3]Monica Hall Sent: Friday, August 28, 2009 9:15 AM Subject: Re: [VIHUELA] Guitarre theorbee or rather Chittarra atiorbata Thank you Monica. As you'll know from our earlier exchanges, I agree with the conclusions about the guitarre theorbee. However there are a couple of significant points about the chitarra atiorbata which you seem to have overlooked or ignored and which point to a rather different conclusion than you (that these instruments had the basses at the low octave): 1. A duplicated bass G is not an objection to the high tuning of the basses - Granata might have simply wished to have a continuous run of free basses. For example to allow a fast run on them without having to play the G away from the these basses and so interrupt the thumb's stroke. Indeed, a good example of this is in the opening Preludio Bar 1 ie 12 11 X 9 8 7 6 0..... 2. The engraved depictions do not show the bass extensions 'slightly less' than a theorbos - they are considerably and significantly less! - this has a real bearing on the sound the basses make. Further, to suggest that this particular feature has been incorrectly represented by the engraver and can therefore be ignored is, I think, working backwards from a presumed conclusion (ie that the basses were at the low octave and thus needed to be longer than illustrated) rather than taking the important evidence at its face value. Martyn --- On Thu, 27/8/09, Monica Hall <mjlh...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote: From: Monica Hall <mjlh...@tiscali.co.uk> Subject: [VIHUELA] Guitarre theorbee To: "Vihuelalist" <vihuela@cs.dartmouth.edu> Date: Thursday, 27 August, 2009, 4:59 PM Just to let you all know that the final version of my thoughts on the subject of the Guitarre theorbee is now on my own web page - [1]www.monicahall.co.uk It includes a staff notation transcription of all twelve pieces from the Gallot manuscript. Monica -- References 1. [4]http://www.monicahall.co.uk/ To get on or off this list see list information at [5]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html -- References 1. mailto:hodgsonmar...@yahoo.co.uk 2. mailto:vihuela@cs.dartmouth.edu 3. mailto:mjlh...@tiscali.co.uk 4. http://www.monicahall.co.uk/ 5. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html